Every morning in group we are asked to introduce ourselves and "name" our emotion of the day. You can say you are feeling, hopeful, happy, content, irritated...and then you are asked to rate your level of this emotion on a scale of 1 to 10. Well, today I couldn't think of an emotion. Nothing. So they passed me the sheet with little happy and sad faces on it, one with oodles and oodles of different feelings. Finally, one stuck out for me today - confused. Today I am a 10 out of 10 on the confusion scale.
Now, I wish I could even tell you WHY I'm confused, but that's part of my confusion! It's taken me longer than normal to get up to writing this post, mostly because I wasn't sure what to write since I don't even know how I feel. However, this writing is supposed to be cathartic so I'm hoping that in doing so I will find something deep down in there.
Maybe, for the sake of this post, I will try to explain how I'm feeling...I feel like my head is a big scattered mess of feelings. One minute I feel like I'm well enough to go home, and the next minute I feel like I'm light years away. One minute I'm feeling happy and hopefulm, the next sad and pessimistic. I'm also beating myself up for the randomness of the thoughts, like I should be more organized or something. I think I'm getting caught up in "feeling better" and am not allowing myself to still have down moments.
A few days ago I felt really good - almost high, and more joyful. I am sort of left bewildered now that that feeling's gone. I felt like I was actually moving forward, moving out of this depression, but here I am, feeling ambivalent again. I guess I don't feel as bad as I did when I came into hospital, but definitely not as great as I did a few days ago. So what happened? I wish I knew! It's like I wake up and I can be a totally different person. The unpredictability is brutal.
As for what else is going on in my "hosital life" - I haven't been sleeping very well, so I'm on an antidepressant named Trazodone for sleep. They just upped my Trazadone from 100 mg to 150 mg per night. Additionally, my lithium level was taken and was at 0.5...should be between 0.7 - 0.9. As a result, my lithium medication was upped last night from 600 mg to 900 mg. This should push me up into the therapeutic range. They say it will take a week to two weeks to feel the full effect of the lithium.
As for visits with Adelyn, I'm still only allowed 2 - 2 1/2 hours at a time. I asked for more but no such luck. Not now anyways. I have such a long road to go, some days I can't even think about it...I need to keep coming back to "one day at a time". I'm at home right now with Adelyn and things went really well, so that's a positive.
Anyways, I will finish this post here...now that you're all caught up! If you are willing to send up prayers for me, please pray that this lithium does stabilize my moods like it is supposed to.
Crossing my fingers,
Amanda
I know exactly how you feel regarding the moods. The mood swings are all over the place which make you frustrated. I'm in a similiar position as you are and you're not alone.
ReplyDeleteI'm on Trazodone for sleeping as well and it seems to work better than the other drugs I've been on. I hope it works better for you. I hope the lithium stabilizes as well.
I think about you all the time and you're doing an amazing job. <3